Top 4 Digital Marketing Strategies for Startups

According to a research, there are over 876 million websites in the world. With that many websites, how can you ensure that your business stands out? With a perfect digital marketing strategy. The better your strategy, the better are your chances of getting more customers and more traffic. Digital marketing strategies is essential to take advantage of the growing opportunities over the net. If you are still new to the world of digital marketing, check out below to understand how you can create your own digital marketing strategy.

1. Set the Objective
First thing first, just set the objectives you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve but don’t set it in stone. Keep in mind that your plan may not be perfect from the outset itself and not every objectives you set will bring desired outcome. Based on the results you may tweak your efforts and strategies slightly to accommodate whatever brings the best results.

Create your digital marketing calendar:

• Try creating your timeline using Google Calendars – that way you can share it with your team members and allow them to edit it where necessary.
• Highlight the key campaigns you’ll create and promote throughout the year and allocate a timeframe for each.
• Document the digital channels needed to ensure the success for each campaign.
• Create a measurement and monitoring plan (this should fit in with your KPIs).

Set Your KPIs:

• By identifying the figures you will be held accountable for achieving.
• Get realistic with your KPIs by analysing your previous digital marketing efforts first – this will ensure you aim for a positive increase on your current results, while helping you to avoid setting your expectations too high.
• Measure your KPIs – by using tools like Google Analytics to measure the conversions & leads you are getting.

2. Analyse Your Previous Work & Learn From Your Mistakes
You don’t have to go deep into the planning.  All you need to do is to analyse the work you have done before. Going through the past success and failures can help you set the best plan for your business.

How to Analyse:

• Determine the time period you would like to analyse and set your Google Analytics calendar to match this timeframe.
• Try out Google’s Benchmarking Reports in your Analytics account to compare your progress to your competitors.
• Don’t forget to analyse your competitors’ strategy too – create an analysis spreadsheet of their online activities.
• Check the success of the individual elements of your strategy at continuous intervals.
• If something is not working (i.e. you’re not achieving the KPIs you’ve set out) isolate the different elements and try to identify the element that is not working (e.g. is it the time you’re posting content or the taglines you’re using for your ads?).
• Revisit your previous analysis, personas and budget allocation and try something new.
  Create a clearly defined KPI for your new venture.

3. Focus on who you’re dealing with
Don’t let the planning take away from the people you’re trying to reach. You already know who your audience are (at least we hope you do) but sometimes they’re the first thing a digital marketer can forget amidst the KPI setting, budget fretting and channel selection.
You’re not going to make this mistake – not this time. Instead you’re going to put your audience at the heart of your strategy, cater to their emotional needs and satisfy their deepest desires. How? Through the creation of well fleshed out and well thought out personas, of course.

Develop Useful Personas:

• Start with the basics and note down all the demographic information you know about your target consumer – like age, gender and location.
• Then dig a little deeper and identify the problems you can help your target persona solve.
• Delve into their emotional desires, goals, aspirations and fears and document all of the factors that could make them tick (think about their conscious and unconscious desires).
• You can dive deep into the ‘Audience Reports of your Google Analytics account to identify key characteristics of your target persona like age, sex, career, etc.
• When creating your personas this is the perfect time to identify the people who will be of influence to them – these will be the influencers your strategy should target.

4. Identify your means (& stick to your budget)
Three things are important for identifying your means: these are your budget, your digital channels and your team (or people). It is important to take stock of all of your resources before deciding on what else you might need for the next period.
For example, now is the perfect time for creating an audit of your existing digital channels and to decide whether you’re going to outsource specific sections of your digital marketing and whether you need to set budget aside for a new hire or two.

How to Identify Your Means:

Your budget:

• Define your overall digital marketing budget.
• Look at the historical data of what has worked before (for example, have any specific channels brought you quality leads at a low cost?)
• Decide whether you will use paid promotion (for, example AdWords or paid ads on social media).
  Allocate a specific portion of the budget for each digital channel you want to use for paid promotion (delve into your Analytics to help you assess the most cost effective digital channels with the largest reach and conversions and the lowest Cost Per Click).
• If a certain element of your paid promotion strategy isn’t bringing you the results you desire, revisit it and invest the allocated budget figure into the channel that’s bringing you the best results.

Your People:

• Look at your current team and assess what you are capable of achieving (be realistic here and ensure that no-one will be over stretched or over worked).
• Identify whether you need to hire more people and whether you have the means to do so.
• Decide whether all of your digital marketing activity will take place in house or if you’ll need to outsource some elements to a third party agency.
• Get each of your team members to review their digital marketing activity and brainstorm a few ideas for their future strategy (the more autonomy your employee has in their role the more they’ll be on board with your new plan).

Your Channels:

• Review your current digital marketing channels and decide which channels to keep and whether you’d like to invest in any new ones (this depends on where your customers are and the time you have available).
• Clearly articulate what each digital channel is trying to achieve.
• Make sure you have at least one KPI attached to each of your digital channels.

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